Minor Moorlands Roads – Part Two

During the summer of 2022, Emily Oldfield set out walking the minor roads pushing into the moors around the town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire – many of them traversing and toying with the county boundary into Lancashire. Emily has long-been interested in edgeland spaces, and these roads in particular as routes of intimacy and abandonment simultaneously; built with great intent by former generations, now rarely-used – places that are neither footpath nor main road, where the pedestrian could then be seen as another aspect of the ‘edge’.  When feeling ‘on the edge’, to choose these routes can be paradoxically a place of solace, possibilities, even power.

The walks – published here on Elsewhere in a three-part series – are an exploration of intimate abandon, loss and yet the courses that connect us – chiefly, love.

Stones Lane

We step into them every day – human remains. From the pavement underfoot to the paths we take, all are a past push… not a mere trace or fragment, but a site of sheer force and cold sweat. 

It is easy to package ‘the past’ as something abstract; an echo in what we say about a place, a sort of ether that runs between the fingers of a hand gesture. Over there. But man-moved stone serves up the past somehow even closer to the present, as presence, an almost-paradox that pulls us further towards it. 

This morning I take the lanes heading towards Stones, a scattering of farmsteads situated high on the hills above Todmorden, close to the dark clutch of Dobroyd Castle; a site of Victorian extravagance now scarred-black and haunted by its own intended splendour. So much moved stone still stirs here – from the weathered warp of the buildings I mention, to the lie of the lane. I scatter pebbles as I walk, dust dredging peat-pickled boots as I look at the dark hump of the hills towards Bacup. I wonder whose tread pressed form to fragments before me, who first laid the course, rolled the rock that now is the route. 

My musing is interrupted by the fourth tallest standing stone in Yorkshire. A looming bolt of blackened by time, it spears the edge of a farmer’s field –around 12-feet tall and bolstered at the base by a rough ring of hewn rocks. Blasted by factory fumes and the bitter bite of persistent Pennine winds, its dark edges give it the demeanour of a far-flung weathervane. A lightning rod. A question mark with no stop. 

But I stop. Perhaps there is an absence in us –an inherited ancestral ache –that angles us to the stance of certain standing stones, how the solo walker finds their body flexing slightly to match its bearing. Falling into those before us. For how many bodies bore this great rib of rock upright?

And when? Surprisingly little information arises about this stone, with no agreed date on when it was set up. Records exist of it being present by 1921, but no known reference before then. Not even a name. 

It is a tongue in the mouth of a time we have no words for. It may well have still been standing in previous centuries, erected as a monument  to the Great War, even the Battle of Waterloo. 

Or older.

Yet the implications of modernity could be seen to stain. Why is that? This stone waits, straddling the border between monument and monolith, track and field, logged and lost. Wavering.

And how when we waver, we reach for rock. The craving to stand in stone seems a human one, time-over: monoliths, buildings, byways, graves. Monuments not only of memory, but for memory. We all become it. I lean against the layers of touch, the sun-soaked rain-rinsed hours of finger-cracking contact, baked into the bulk of the drystone wall. I lean and lean, feel its unknown weight pushing my tissues closer to bone. And still I can’t reach the stone. No human armspan could from here. 

Perhaps it is this ungraspable intention, the tactile unknown, that draws us in particular to menhirs; standing stones. 

So we keep reaching.

And I keep walking. 

Doghouse Lane 

Steep slopes draw abandon to the surface. I think about it as I take on the tarmac of Doghouse Lane, a track arching up out of Todmorden and unspooling over the moors to Cornholme. The initial incline is unrelenting, the course quickly gaining ascent as it pushes above the town, as desperate as an outstretched arm. Get out.

Breath builds behind each footfall, arms loosen, and I feel the familiar angst under my ribs dissipate into something else. Each inhalation echoes through the body. I am drawn to walking these minor moorland roads – typically unfashionable and unpublicised routes, often overlooked as the territory of the occasional land-rover, nearby farmer and the lost. Here the walker encounters the road –a craft of human hardship and hiccup in the land simultaneously – alongside the pummelled patchwork of South Pennine moorland. We become the borders, occupy an edge.

Abandon. Mind and body orientate to the undulations of terrain, thoughts fuse. I quickly pass the florid green of cultivated trees above Centre Vale Park and push on amidst the unfolding brushwork of burgundy, brown and off-yellow moorland. Wind hits every exposed angle of my face. I find myself simultaneously an onlooker and an accomplice as the landscape loosens like a shaken sheet, moving with my grasping stare and eager tread.

A few scattered farms fleck the opening aspect of landscape, and the occasional large car passes – somehow cold and impersonal. I keep walking, the interlocking valleys of the Cliviger Gorge on one side and Walsden on the other opening up, spangled by interlocking sunlight and low-lying cloud. Inherited abandon. The very road beneath my feet is a flex of it, forged in a past where it meant more than just an occasional, isolated track. Its name darts between possibilities; Doghouse becoming Parkin Lane, then Flower Scar Road, then Tower Causeway, ending as Carr Road. Furrowed edges tell of agricultural attempts ages  back, now wandering half-shorn sheep occupy. They drift into the single-file road in the absence of any fence or wire.

I drift too, body buffeted by wind and warm coils of temperamental sunshine. In these moorlands, the breeze breathes through industrial remains as much as it rolls the cry of the curlew, the pheasants trembling trill. On my left, the hills bordering the East Lancashire town of Bacup push up, their blown-brown backs intersected by turbines, pylons and brooding pine plantations. 

And then I stumble into Sourhall. An old row of terraced cottages marks the site of something so much bigger. A public information board tells me of this later on the route, far-flung and stark like the most melancholy of memorials. Out of place. For the cottages, and a rather uncanny estate of half-finished new-builds behind them, tell  little themselves of a former factory (Peel Mill), later to become a Smallpox Isolation Hospital in 1874. Industry becomes illness. Exposure becomes isolation.

Inherited abandon. The surge within myself I meet in walking the weave of these moorland roads. And when I wonder of how the ill would have watched the thrashing, flexing moor arch around them, I pull my coat closer and keep the route. 

***

Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. Born in Burnley in 1995 and growing up in the East Lancashire town of Bacup, her first poetry pamphlet Grit (published by Poetry Salzburg, March 2020) explores the history and folklore of the Rossendale Valley of her childhood. Her second poetry pamphlet (also with Poetry Salzburg) is titled Calder and due in 2022, largely exploring the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire - especially around the town of Todmorden, where she currently lives. Emily is now working on a book and probably wandering somewhere in the West Yorkshire/East Lancashire edgelands.

Minor Moorlands Roads – Part One

During the summer of 2022, Emily Oldfield set out walking the minor roads pushing into the moors around the town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire – many of them traversing and toying with the county boundary into Lancashire. Emily has long-been interested in edgeland spaces, and these roads in particular as routes of intimacy and abandonment simultaneously; built with great intent by former generations, now rarely-used – places that are neither footpath nor main road, where the pedestrian could then be seen as another aspect of the ‘edge’.  When feeling ‘on the edge’, to choose these routes can be paradoxically a place of solace, possibilities, even power.

The walks – published here on Elsewhere in a three-part series – are an exploration of intimate abandon, loss and yet the courses that connect us – chiefly, love.

Todmorden Old Road

It starts out as reach into the hills, around the back of a housing estate in Bacup. Known in my childhood as ‘Back Lane’ or ‘Dark Lane’, idioms abound suggesting a push to the edges. Todmorden Old Road rises as a single-file flex of rough tarmac, initially bordered by brambles on one side, a stretch of wall weathered into various states of moss-strewn disrepair on the other. There is the perpetual tang of wet bark and wood rot, exploded open through summer and into autumn by the florid fizz of somehow never-quite-healthy blackberries and a density of dandelions. 

Follow the road up far out of Bacup enough and a walker can reach the crest at Sharneyford where Lancashire slumps down on one side whilst West Yorkshire arches up on the other. I stand at that intersection now, the personal points of childhood and adulthood split by a glistening grey belt of hills and the ripped-up course of the road. This is a route rarely travelled by vehicles now  – other than the occasional shuddering tractor and red shock of the mail van – and yet once was a key link between two counties; though the county boundary itself a contentious blur of argument, artifice and echo. I imagine it hovering and drifting like a buzzard buoyed by the muffled prospect of prey, now fought over by public propaganda and irregular footfall. 

These minor moorland highways are alive with prospect and past potential. On Todmorden Old Road, I’m walking through what could have been, as someone now. There’s that wrench in the chest, a burn that the books of both childhood and adulthood would have a word for. A whole genre. A human heave I can feel at the edge of my eyes, in the skittering beat behind ribs and the roll of cold sweat between fabric and skin as I walk. 

Yet part of me doesn’t want to write about walking these roads at all. For in the aftermath of personal pain, why don’t I push off through wild upland and well beyond the mundane, the mechanical? Reflect on fumbling away from the footpaths and meeting the bite of bogland between my toes? Because I’m ashamed. Ashamed of my own assumption that the landscape equates to escape. Ashamed of my tendency to want to fall into the revered narrative of walker meets wildness. Ashamed too, of the hurt I have caused and the ways I have reacted, acted, reacted.

And I’m coming to terms with, as readily as I will wander over hill and dale… most of all, I am drawn to these minor moorland roads; a place where the pedestrian seems seldom, their hard and their hold. 

Here, language lies in the cut and thrust of the route, how it writhes through stone and sediment in a surge of gradient that can be felt under foot. A force that seems to take on the lie of the land with a trodden truth.  

So much still does. Close by,  bumping the edge of my vision on the left is Tooter Hill – a site of ancient field systems, a possible ring cairn burial and traces thought to date as far back as the Neolithic. Touch upon touch upon touch. Now mine pits and pock-marked mounds stubble the escarpment, the bulge of earth enmeshed in yellow-green grass, the picked-out course of a footpath and the marks of a search. 

Searching for a hold.

In discussions of loss and heartbreak, John Bowlby posits the concept of ‘searching for the lost object’ as the state of angst and upset the individual goes through, sifting through fragments of the departed, fumbling over a promised future.

 Walking these roads has become my way of stepping into that promise, feeing it shift and crack as I tread. Here a sense  of place comes through a throb – a heart, a hurt, the human intent that still hums in the course of the route. The lost object forever lies in these roads. And to step out is to hold on in the only way I can. 

Allescholes Road

I step into a former thoroughfare, a channel of change and industry, blown by time to a track. The dialectical drawl of ‘the back of beyond’ is a mere breath away – and indeed, this a place now behind the routes we recognise, yet still reaching for something, fumbling further into a time we can’t quite fathom. 

Allescholes Road pushes into the Western hills above Walsden, and I stumble onto it as I make my way down from the moorland, having joined a friend for the first leg of the Todmorden Boundary Way. The area where the minor road intersects the sogged strip of footpath is still ripe with the reek of bogland. It is a particular Pennine flavour – peaty loam pummelled through with weeks-old water and sheep shit split open with rain. 

Beaten-grey clouds hang low and clot across the land, any hope of horizon blunted by swirling bouts of mist. Moisture moves over my face like a shroud and my chest heaves. The surrounding steep benchwork of hills throw their shadows through the fray; though what initially seems like a landscape drained of its colour, is punctured by the occasional stark shout of a foxglove. Swollen cyan trumpets laugh their colour in a wind that offers no regularity, captures breath with no answer. These plants point to our deficiencies, stirring as a reminder that all personal projections in this place are the past. The present is coarse and hard and rips off any romanticised attachment with the wrench of the wind. It catches in my throat with foam, phlegm and a click. 

I crave to locate to Todmorden somewhere to my left, Littleborough to the right, but direction drains away and my body, still hungering for traces, fixes on finding the road from the path. One hand still clutches a found clot of moss like wet hair. Absence arises as an angular feeling under the skin and I snort, sending more water skittering over my face. 

Then my foot meets the rubble of the roadway with a shudder. Semi-solidity after miles of ambiguous, uncompromising moor comes as a shock. And yet there is almost an urgency as to how the road – Allescholes Road–  takes on the topography of the valley, arching and unfurling with tactile intent. For how many people took to build this, whose hands, and when? I wonder– almost crouching in the body’s coil of relief – over what love and hate, what impatience and angst, what boredom and bitterness and sheer brute force did human hands drive this stone into place? Questions are quashed as the sound of each sogged footfall rises as a shh, shh, shhh. 

I drag my feet against saturated stone and look at how the route pushes parallel to the valley bottom, merging into Reddishore Scout. This was once the well-worn packhorse trail linking Walsden with Calderbrook (then towards Summit and Littleborough), and beyond, a linkage forged with prospect and promise, steering clear of the swampy valley base. It was only when the turnpike road was cut through the bottom in the early nineteenth century, that Allescholes Road became optional, then occasional… and now, touched with an air of abandon. 

I feel it too. I watch the straggle of settlements below me busy with human hum and bustle, and the raw roll under my ribs rises to meet them. Falls. Rises. Falls. On these minor moorland roads we find the hurt of ourselves in the hills, we trace back to feelings buried and impulses dashed. It is here I walk with a heart soaked open, and as the horizon hazes into the hill – I stop, reach out and watch the wave of my hand become a blur. 

***

Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. Born in Burnley in 1995 and growing up in the East Lancashire town of Bacup, her first poetry pamphlet Grit (published by Poetry Salzburg, March 2020) explores the history and folklore of the Rossendale Valley of her childhood. Her second poetry pamphlet (also with Poetry Salzburg) is titled Calder and due in 2022, largely exploring the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire - especially around the town of Todmorden, where she currently lives. Emily is now working on a book and probably wandering somewhere in the West Yorkshire/East Lancashire edgelands.

The Devil's Chair

By Hannah Green:

We are sitting at the foot of the Devil’s Chair. Because of the fog, and haziness of memory, we thought it was still some way off along the ridge, but as my stepfather peers at the map on his phone screen we realise we’ve been here all along. It’s New Year’s Day, and bitterly cold. Not as cold as it should be (and it never seems to be) but after twenty minutes sitting hunched on damp rock, extra hats and pairs of gloves begin to emerge from the depths of my mother’s rucksack. It’s my birthday. I am twenty-two. I think that perhaps I should be somewhere else - among friends, perhaps, recovering from New Year’s Eve celebrations with a fry up and a thick head. I’m not sure if I’m doing it right.

We have tramped up the muddy, frost-laced lanes to the edge of the moor, overtaking other families also on their New Year’s Day walks thanks to my mother’s unremitting marching stride. When I was younger her constant disappearance off into the distance, around corners, over hills and away from me was a source of exasperation and hot teenage rage. Now it reassures me. It was clear when we set out, bright and sharp with the white light of the winter sun stripped-back and pure, the curves and dips of the landscape clear-edged and poised as we drove through the slow country lanes. This journey always makes me carsick, and I had pressed my temple to the cool glass of the window as hedgerows and ridges and dark hollows passed in a sickly carousel of snatched images.  

The Stiperstones had risen up grey and veiled with mist, eerily so amidst the hazy brightness of the rest of the countryside and comically forbidding. As we climbed, the damp air became soft and celestial, soothing the brittleness of the midwinter sun. There is a lull about the Stiperstones even on clear days - perhaps it is because they are so suddenly high that you feel lifted almost against your will, away from the rest of Shropshire and the Marches, which become tiny and surreal. There’s the bareness of them too - the rough rocks and heather, then the large boulders rising up hard and sharp from the moor, like teeth, or ruined fortresses. It is hard not to feel the hostility of it as well as the strange beauty. This is where we pick bilberries in August, where we played on the rocks and among the springy heather as children, but it is also where the snow falls the deepest and where the landscape is the most unremitting, and the closest thing we have to wildness. 

Or so it seems  - the sharp rocks and the scrubby heather and the autumn gold of the bracken are thick with walkers and picnics and family days out whatever the time of year, whatever the weather. We smile and nod as we pass other walkers, and make faces at each other if we think the other party hasn’t been sufficiently friendly. It’s all a charade - really we want the land all to ourselves, we want it pure and quiet and as it is, even if ‘as it is’ is maintained by careful grazing, heather burning, coppicing, path maintenance and boundary fencing. It’s the closest thing we have to wilderness, but it’s closer to a theme park of wilderness than the thing itself, meticulously preserved by people who love it, and people who live on it. 

Despite its state of suspended preservation, of a land in formaldehyde, this place is humming with stories. It lends itself. My favourite was always Wild Edric, a Welsh rebel with a faerie bride whose hunt rides these hills searching for her still. It’s been a long time since the Welsh rebelled, open hostility lulled to gentle piss-taking over the centuries. Edric took his bride by force when he saw her dancing in the woods with her sisters. She was a faerie, of course, and this tale is full of the usual tropes - our hero spies on the faerie gathering, rushing three times into the magical clearing only for the party and its revellers to disappear, before he finally snatches the most beautiful of the dancers to be his wife. She promises this on the condition that he never mock her sisters. An oddly specific promise, and perhaps one she knew he’d have trouble keeping. Of course he breaks it, and of course she vanishes, and of course he rides with his ghostly hunt to this day, the call of the trumpets and the baying of dogs echoing in the narrow gullies and ringing out on the pasture land, searching, searching, searching. Women always seem to be disappearing -  from Scottish selkies turning back to the sea to Eurydice sinking into Hades, they love to slink away back into the woods, the cold sea, the dark and cavernous underworld. I imagine it’s more peaceful there, although the woods here are far fewer and far between than they once were. 

The other story is about the devil. He seems to feature quite a lot locally -  he makes the Wrekin, inhabits demon bulls, tries to trick old women and presides over witches’ covens in stone circles. Is it chilling that he is so active, or comical? This story is both. For some reason, the devil was furious with a nearby village - they were too godly, or not godly enough, or perhaps he was having a bad day. However it came about, the Devil took it into his head that he was going to cover them in rocks, which he collected in his apron (this, for me, is the comic part). It’s a long walk from Hell, so the Devil stopped for a rest on the ridge of the Stiperstones, on a large rocky outcrop. Perhaps it was too comfortable, and he dozed off, or perhaps it was too uncomfortable, and he was shifting around - in any case, he lost his grip on the apron and the rocks came tumbling out, landing sprawled on the hillside. This was too much for the Devil, who gave up and went home, leaving the rocks to lie there, and the village unscatherd, where they both remain to this day. 

My practical, natural sciences mother explains the glacial history of the region to us - the enormous stones carried and dropped by huge sheets of ice rather than demonic ire. But I prefer to think about the remote mining villages and hill farming communities with their hard churches and long roads repeating stories of Devils and faeries and Welsh brigands, creating this land over and over at every telling. I drink rapidly cooling coffee from our ancient thermos and balance a tupperware of birthday cake on my knee, and as the cloud lifts suddenly the whole world is spread out below me, bright and beginning again. 

***

Hannah Green is a writer from Shropshire, UK. She is deputy editor at ARCCA Magazine, and events officer at The Selkie, and is interested in ecology, place and community. Her work has appeared in The Cardiff Review and Quarterlife Magazine, and is upcoming in the Nonbinary Review and Pilgrim Magazine. You can find more of her writing here. 

Winter Spell: A walk through Heptonstall

By Anna Evans:

These grasses of light
Which think they are alone in the world
These stones of darkness
Which have a world to themselves
– Ted Hughes

In my hand a shard of ice. I trace the shape of its perimeter. A prism hastily frozen and troubled by wind and rain, trapping air and all the falling elements of the earth below. It has a solidity, a texture that hints at the colours of the land beyond its edges, of green and brown, opaque, and patterned. The mesmerizing quality of looking through where the rain froze into earth in crystals of reflected light. On its surface bright scatters of light like carvings, as though initialed or drawn in delicate lines of white silver.

It is cold when we walk here. The spell of winter freezes over ponds and parts of rivers. The ground is held silent, the saddened grass still, nothing moves. In the winter when the light is always fading. The icy cold brings respite from the valleys running down with rain, from eroded riverbanks, the wind that batters fragile skeleton trees. Each frozen puddle lies in trails from rising rivers. The muddy ground is packed in tightly, ready to move again.

From this ground to the dark stone of houses. A steep hill leading upwards to the village perched on a hill, notable for the preservation of its narrow lanes and cobbled streets, windswept and shaken by the elements. Walking through the lanes past stone cottages with slate roofs and chimneys, stable doors of different colours. In the centre of a little square of cobblestones and paving stands a tree with lights and decorations. The village inns are lantern-lit, inviting.

In these quiet times there are words and pictures to bring it closer. Instead of going there, I am picturing the journey to Heptonstall along the road that travels from Mytholmroyd to Todmorden. The familiar stone of the houses and winter trees, the shadows of the hills, seem to blend one into the other.

The poet found in this landscape a mythology of stone and water; the words to write about a time already vanishing, the remains of Elmet. The haze that hangs across the valleys, the mist of rain. In the smoke from the mills and chimneys of factories, the ceaseless damp that made its way into the stone, to turn it black. In the weavers cottages are the histories of the lives that passed through; the blackened walls that absorbed their voices. We walk along to the old church its ancient frames laid open, exposed against the sky, underfoot uneven tombstones. You wrote of the ruined frame of the old church as the ancient bones of a giant bird that landed.

In the graveyard, we find the headstone marking barely thirty years in letters plain and black. Contested little stone that makes its claim to the land, far from home or fanfare. On a hilltop resting place exposed, with its pantheon of wind and rain and harsh elements, among stones you walked. In the poet’s eye only stone remains, moving outwards, ever outwards from the stone of a grave. A singular line to the empty moors and dark skies, forlorn, firm, and resolute. Marking a life turned inwards. You picture dark swans, wings beating, take flight across the valley; not one but many now, their wings spread wide in shelter, over hills and beyond to the crest of an ocean. 

High crags and lines of trees look down to the emptiness of hills, bleak and featureless. The grass seems hardened and scrubbed, it waves and ripples in the wind, unyielding, made to survive the elements. Sometimes you perceive the landscape as nothingness, where everything feels unfixed and even the land is temporary, drowned out by wind.

Drawn in lines the brooding sky, the hanging cloud, the dark constant of the horizon. The moorland furrowed dark and light with grass and rock. Then the line of the crag, a crater curves through and cuts into the landscape precipitous. The dry-stone wall piled up as if taken from the side of the valley and abandoned here. 

In the shelter of the moors, in the winter spell, the light is always fading. Narrow roads lead upwards, disappearing suddenly up impossible ascents, to the villages and farmhouse on the hills; the drear sweep of cloud, or mist: of still. The cycle of rain to river to clouds to hills. Weavers cottages stand tall at the side of the valley and low dark terraces in rows. In the still of winter it is almost possible to sense the residual smoke hanging across the valleys from abandoned chimneys and textile mills. A place caught in time and held by its lines of canals, the stone that trickles down from hill into valley. 

Even a fragment of ice has an accidental quality. As I hold it in my hand attempting to give it a significance, it has begun to melt very slowly. Tiny amounts of water receding from its edges; the shape it has become already changing. I lay it down once more on the cold and frozen soil, already less than whole, so it can continue its existence with every other part of earth and water that lies along the ground I walk. From its edges, moving outwards. 

The landscape leaves its marks, draws its way through my veins, like the road running through tree-lined stretches, where trees tunnel over us. This is how I remember it, etched in, and layered with buildings. The dark river, which is high at this time of year, winds through Hebden Bridge. The town is lit by lights, winter blue. In my hand a shard of ice. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from West Yorkshire, currently based in Cambridge. She writes about place and memory, travel and migration, and is working on a non-fiction project on the author Jean Rhys and the spaces in her fiction. You can follow her progress through her blog The Street Walks In. 

In the Back Seat

By Anna Evans:

In the back seat you observe the journey from a different angle and your eyes are free to wander from the road ahead. The space of the back seat is exactly the right size so that you can lie across it if you want to, and pretend to sleep.

In the back seat, the time is not now; it is unending horizons, the space of a snowflake. The map isn’t an accurate one, but a blend of the real and imaginary, where different journeys can merge together and become one. In the back seat you are always travelling home, the sky darkening around you.

In the back seat you are transported. It is the perfect mode of non-navigational travel. Protected and vulnerable, the fuzzy blanket of childhood, the one which lets you dream in peace, the window framing images of the world passing by.

The back seat is the site of stories and of daydreams, the ones which come without being summoned, like a ritual to trace over the back of your hand. The speed and the motion allowing glimpses, partial and unformed, always passing and never fully realized. From the back seat I am always looking for places that will tell me stories.

From the back seat you watch the road in a different way, through the side window. Counting the boundaries along the road as they flash by swallowed up, each the same as the next, never to be seen again. The road signs going past so quickly, but looking back means being left behind, means missing the next one… The names of places take on a mythical aspect. The Devil’s Elbow…

My favourite journeys. The ascent to the moors, that gradual climb, the winding roads, the fields, the dry stone walls, the lost villages, the farmhouses which become more and more spaced out. It is breath taking to look around, to see below, laid out like a memory, the valleys, and to feel transported from it all.

The ascent to the moors. And when you’re up there it’s like a plateau where time feels different. Slowing down for the sheep walking along the road. Always wanting to stop and give them a hug. Looking through the window at those hills which always seem out of bounds somehow, they are boundless.

With my eyes I follow the trails, the trodden paths fading away to nothing. A place to be on the run, a fugitive landscape. Bleak, high and unyielding, this landscape without shelter, where only sheep could live, boulders next to the sky. A place where people seem out of place, those tiny walkers and climbers, a place to get lost in. The sheep, already prepared with their solid feet, their warm and waterproof coats. Even the footpaths look out of place somehow, as if you would drift away from them, bidden by some siren song, away into a parallel landscape far from anywhere.

- Tell us about the time when mum got stuck in a bog!

In the back seat, I listen to stories of walking up here and straying from the footpath. Imagining my mum stepping in the bog, her foot sinking, my dad trying to pull her out….

- Oh no, please don’t tell that story…

No, don’t tell it, but do… because it fills me with trepidation and excitement all at once. Imagining what it must be like, the foot caught, being pulled downwards into the bog, sinking into the earth. Like a trap laid by the hills themselves, to warn us away and keep us from venturing too far. Imagining the bog a living entity. How would you know it was there? How would you stop yourself from sinking?

In the back seat we make up stories about the passers-by, the lone runners and cyclists become fugitive too. Where are they going? They are criminals for sure, escaping the scene of the crime.

The forlorn houses on the edge of the hills seem like the last outposts, just below the clouds, or at the edge of an ocean. Waking each day to their desolate spectre, misty ocean, stretching as far as the eye can see. Full fathom; acres of rolling seas.

The part of the road where it feels like you’re flying - long and straight through a ravine cut into the hills. Scammonden Dam on a school trip. The sun shines and we draw sketches of pond skaters, and they tell us about the village sunk underneath the reservoir. This takes on mythical proportions for me, as the story of Pompeii.

- Look there’s Damian’s house.

- Who’s Damian?

- A friend of mine. He lives in that little house by the water. Hello Damian!

- Does Damian really live here? But doesn’t he get lonely?

- There he is, look he’s waving. Hello Damian!

- Can we meet him?

- Well, he is very shy.

Sometimes getting out of the car and knocking on the door of the wooden shack next to the water, and peering through the tiny windows calling out ‘Damian, Damian’… sometimes driving past and waving.

- Can we visit Damian?

- Damian isn’t in today.

The reservoir, high up and dramatic like a coal black furnace, the clouds dark grey with fury, or sad and open, the land of twilight blue. The cast of the hills above Meltham dark and alone, rain clouds the view towards them.

The backseat on the way home at night. The lights of the towns and the strange psychedelic lights of the motorway, sometimes well lit, high up, laying out the wasteland below them in empty, white, measured light. Sometimes the roads have barely any visibility, and it is then that you follow the red taillights in front, and the lights of the oncoming cars, creeping stealthily through the shadows. What can and can’t be seen conjures up a thousand travelling possibilities, the countryside spread out in darkness, the cat’s eyes in the road reflecting back our own intrepid lights. Let me tell you about cat’s eyes, you say…

The darkening sky marks the inside space of the car out as mysterious, and the driver into further reaches away. Silence is the place where the flickering miles creep by. I must remain awake, alert. My job is to monitor the surrounding landscape and I keep a vigil, keeping my dad company on our journeys together. While the inside of the car is shrouded in mystery, the seats, the objects; I can form a silent communion with the outside, familiar but cast anew. I am reflected in the window, my own features becoming one with the scenery outside, the recognisable call of the forehead, nose and lips, the eyes. Blinking lights fall into them and are swallowed up. Following the road of my own thoughts as you would trace the line of a headland. Like existing with your own ghost beside you; the self which ends and is endless.

In the back seat it is always the journey home at night and looking outwards becomes looking inwards. Crossing the high dark moors, the scattered lights of the houses seem fragile, the road seeming to melt once more into the hills as it is engulfed by the descending blackness all around.

About the author:
Anna Evans is a writer and researcher from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia in 2017. She is currently working on a project on the places in Jean Rhys’s fiction.